Link building has always been associated with link exchanges, link request emails, link buying etc. Not any more. They’re all old-school stuff people try and waste their time on. Now since the social media revolution, there’s a whole new array of sites available that allows SEOs and webmasters to get some link juice from them for free. Now, these features will be taken for a ride, if given out freely, and they know. For the same reason, many of the sites have converted from “dofollow” to “nofollow“.

Social Media sites are basically communities where like minded guys gather up and share stuff. Be it SU, or Digg, there’s a community within. And universally, SEOs and Webmasters are looked upon with a raised eyebrow because these guys (you and me) tend to manipulate the system, and benefit from it. So let me warn you, what I’m going to tell you is of course a part of SEO, but this does not mean we have flock to all of them and start building links from day one.

Social media sites are seen generally as traffic generation machines. Be it Digg or SU, people see it as a medium to get the extra ordinary visibility for their websites, and take advantage of the large communities there. This is something that’s open to discussion. Whether to use social media sites for link building or to leave them off as communities and let them exist for what they are.

Now, here are the social media sites that are known (as of today) to pass link juice apart from teh community benefits. Some of them give huge traffic, some does not, but give you good healthy, relevant google juice.

Digg - Digg gives link juice from all the stories submitted. If you are on a top page, you have higher PR link juice, if you are on the upcoming page, lesser.

Mixx - Mixx does pass link juice and it’s easy to use it to rank high on SERPs as of now. But it’s a growing community, so it may not be easier later. Bit right now, it’s a good tool.

Hugg - Hugg is almost like digg with focus on environmental issues. Links are crawlable and passes juice.

Linkinn - Linkinn has some offbeat categories that you won’t find in the mainstream, popular social media site. A PR 6 site it features videos and pictures. Links are indexed and pass juice.

Reddit - One of the most popular guys around, reddit still have it’s links dofollowed so if you make it to the top pages, you’re lucky.

Indian Pad - Audience that’s Indian targeted, this guy is the only most popular social media site in India. Links are crawlable and indexed, and does pass on Google juice. The most popular categories are Tech and News

Backflip - Social bookmarking site with PR 6. Links are crawlable and passes on link juice.

Mister Wong - One of my favorites, Wong is a PR 6 social bookmarking site that allows dofollow links.

Mylink Vault - This guy gives you PR 5 backlinks, clean interface, good tool.

Swik - A clean social bookmarking site that gives you PR 6 backlinks. The community id for developers and open source enthusiasts.

That’s it for now. There are quite a number of other niche social media sites that help you with link juice and targeting niche communities. A healthy participation in these communities respecting the members and the laws can ensure you long lasting help with link building and traffic.

Link building is the trump card in SEO. As I have stated on many occasions, a wise and clever link building strategy can take care of a stupid on site optimized site. So even if everything on your site went wrong. Having a carefully planned link building strategy will rescue you and push you up the SERPs more than a good on site optimization strategy.

The only problem is that link building can be a bit more costly. I would never suggest you to buy links from other sites, but if it is essential, try to source some good relevant links from related sites on the same domain space.

However, there are still some myths regarding link building that still exist, and people a bit scary or skeptical when talking about it. I would tell them that link building is nothing to worry about, in fact if carefully planned it can work you wonders. Let’s discuss some common myths on link building and why shouldn’t you worry about link building.

1. Link building is not just about numbers.
   Link building is not about getting the maximum number of links. There is a widespread belief that the more links you get, the better. Well that’s true but it doesn’t mean that you can beat an existing top rank guy on the SERPs ONLY by having more number of links than them. Many a imes, when I talk to SEOs and clients, many of them first counts the number of links to their competitor, and says that we got to gather more links than them to beat them. And I cannot completely agree. Go to point 2.
2. Less links but more power
   In my opinion, to beat an existing guy, you don’t need to gather more links than him. But you should collect more “meaningful” links. I’d say “Power” links. Power links even though lesser in number, by their value and authority will give you stronger and bigger pushes up the SERPs. So essential, if your competitor has 100 backlinks, then it’s possible to even have 20 power links and get a better position than him on the SERPs.
3. How old are you ? I mean the links.
   Another crucial factor is that the age of links does matter while counting the backlinks. Sometimes, people asks me, why can’t you set up 100 blogs on blogger.com or wordpress.com and then link all of them to my main website? Wouldn’t that be like 100 backlinks for free? Well, I wish if it was easier that way. It works perfect if you had a blogger.com blog running for a longer time and you had decent PR on it. But you can’t just create 100 of them on one fine day and get links from them. The reason is that they dont have the age advantage. Unlike in real life, the older the links are the better. So it makes sense to gather links from an aged domain (check with webarchive.org) rather than a new one.
4. Link boosters
   Now, to help fight tight competition, we have the link boosters. They are “special” links that can be sourced from exclusive domains. Like .edus, .govs, and .orgs. Well, since this Google guy is so clever, he thinks that links from a .gov and .edu are hard to source, and if some one did link to you, that means you are likely to be an authority, just like the way you are. And they are partially right. .Gov sites are government authorizations and they are not generally willing for link sales. So once you have their links that’s most likely because your site is relevant to the content.
   Google also should be knowing that many of them has blogs. I’ll stop it there.
5. Just any text link won’t help. Why?
   I wish if it was that way. But the problem is that gathering links from any source just doesn’t matter. It even becomes like a no link at all situation. Valid links should always come from contextual content and related sites. So if you want a link to a dating site, you source a link from a relationship site.
6. Contextual links?
   And also it’s important that the links should be contextual. NO sitewide links, single anchor text links. They are OK, but what’s of value to you is contextual ones that are more like a suggestion from the webmaster, or recommendation to visit your site, naturally.
7. Google v/s Yahoo v\s MSN
   Finally, if you have been checking Google for backlinks, then you’d be having a tough and confusing situation. Google (deliberately) does not show all links to your site. But Yahoo and MSN are more fair on this and will show you more links. So don’t check your backlinks on Google and fret over it. Yahoo is better than the big G in some aspects.

Hope it all makes sense.

Hope you’re already aware of Image Optimization. Designers out there may immediately think about the gif format and image compression, but this is clearly not anything related to reducing image size.

SEO and images are a bit old school I agree. Gone are the days when you had to insert keywords into your ALT tags and get a better rank than your competitor.
In fact, Google has changed it’s algorithm to filter out these “weeds” who’d do anything and everything from stuffing keywords to title spamming to get a better rank.

Though I agree that Search Engine Optimizing your images won’t give you any edge to directly push you over the top of the SERPs, I stick to the idea that they are not completely negligible.

Why do you still need Image Optimization then ?

- Accessibility
- Better end user experience
- Valid code
- Helps the overall impression on your site

Accessibility is one crucial factor many of us ignore while designing websites. And may be..it’s completely fair from our perspective. But coming back to design basics, if you are not taking care of it, you are not doing things right. It’s like leaving the html tags open, and you may still argue that your text is showing up on the browser, so why should you close it? You know that a good code must have the html tags closed.

Better user experience - Imagine you block all the images on the browser because you want to save some bandwidth and cut down your internet bill, and you visit cnn.com only to see that you can’t see the images in there. Instead everything appear all white. You won’t be able to even make out what the content or story is all about. Had the images carried an ALT tag, users could easily make out what the image is all about, even if didn’t load on the browser.

Valid code - As the first point said, valid code is essential for SE optimized pages. you have to follow a W3C compliant structure, in order to get the trust form search engines. Now for that to happen, there is no way you leave image optimization unattended.

Helps the overall look and impression of your site - You like flowers and colors, and everyone else does too. You like websites that has images to decorate it while a few others prefer to remain plain and pale. If you want to look good - be good.

Now, if you are thinking that you don’t have the time to go edit all ALT tags on your pages and add Title tags in it, here’s a wordpress plugin that will help you do it in a click. It’s called SEO Friendly Images.

Here’s what it does.

- Adds ALT tags acording to your preference on all articles.
- you can select whether to add the post title OR the image name OR both as the ALT tags OR Title tag OR both.
- Ensures W3C valid code for the images.

To see it in action hover your mouse on the image above.

Download it here.

Did you ever had an opportunity to Google your name/product/service/company name and come up with a negative result? An abuse or some comments on a sleazy site? Cases of damaged/torn online reputation have been reported more than any other time these days.

With lot of UGC (User Generated Content) thrown up these days, the possibilities of your online reputation getting damaged is high. Online Reputation Management is important for companies and brands these days. Here’s how I would depict it in a flow chart.

Googler looking for information associated with your brand/name ===> Uses search engines
Scans top results on Google ===> Finds information regarding you/product/brand
If positive review ===> Buys/commits to you.
If negative feedback ===> Ditches you.

In the process flow, the crucial point is when he makes a decision. And precisely at that point, if you don’t have the vital information, then you lose out.

So how do companies or brands make sure that they preserve their online identity?

Well, it’s not possible to completely create a positive environment for every online identity, be it a person or a company or a brand. And with products and services, it’s a different story altogether. With everyone writing their reviews (and then re-writing it again) on all services and products online, it’s come out that unless you have a fair amount of both negative and positive results, you are not seen as a genuine guy. So the idea is to minimize the negative results and keep control of the online identities.

What if you had negative reviews about you on the SERPs?

Well, before dealing with the problem, let’s understand that there may be more than two situations to this.
One - Where you’d have genuine negative reviews, like for example if you have a product or service, that’s been honestly reviewed by bloggers. If it’s a not so good product, then of course people will write/report about it honestly. There might occur both good and bad reviews.

In such cases, a healthy approach using SEO and effective SMM strategies, can get you out of the situation. However, if the product/service is a failure product, then we might have to fight a but hard to clear all the negative results. Honestly, that’s an utopia. What really can be done is to minimize the number of negative results.

Second -The case of wrong identities
This happens with names and individuals more than companies and brands. Like for instance if someone else is sharing your name, you’ll have a tough time sharing resources online for each other.
Last day I had come across two cases where the person was suffering from negative reputation, because of wrong online channels. His name was associated with a negative story on one of the authority sites, while the only thing he had in similar was only the name, He wasn’t the guy in the story. But, when others search for his name online, they might come across the negative story causing him trouble.

In such cases, a clever mix of SEO, SMM and online branding can solve the problem.

Essentially, Reputation Management is very important in todays scenario when people use the online space heavily to find information about things.

Brands, Companies and Individuals have to harness the power of social media to build their reputation online, or else it’s going to be too late.

One of the things that gathers moss as we go along is the site design. And it’s even worse with blogs. Wordpress unfortunately has got lot of plugins and frills available for free, that we all keep on adding them until one day we find that it’s all biting back on the blog.

For instance, all the styling and the plugins we add, do you have any idea how much extra junk is added to the code? You might want to check today. Code ratio, Page size, and a lot of stuff get affected, and the funny thing is that you never notice it but is under the impression that they are all doing good for your blog. Let’s de clutter the blog with all those unwanted fancy stuff and allow that fresh rush

1. Plugins and widgets
   How many new plugins have you added recently? It’s great if you can keep track of all the plugins you installed and uninstalled by keeping a document log about it because, not only does it help you to keep track of things but also help you to find out what went wrong. Sometimes, when you come across unexpected errors, most of the times it’s due to a new plugin you installed or it’s non-compatibility with another one. If you have non-running plugins at this time, go ahead and delete the plugin file from the directory.
   Or if you have been running a stupid plugin that you don’t use, remove it and you’ll save quite a lot on the code size.
2. Check for duplicate meta tags
   Although meta tags are not really important in getting ranks on the SERPs, they are still important in attracting visitors to your site. Check your “site:www.yoursite.com” search on Google, and you can see the title tags and meta description for all the pages indexed.
   There are instances like using two plugins UTW and HeadSpace or UTW and All in One SEO, which results in duplicate meta tags and description. See which plugin is causing the duplicate content and delete it or change the settings accordingly.
3. Check your page size
   Use this tool and check your page size. Make sure you have an optimum page size so that it doesn’t take ages to load your page on a slower internet connection. Most of the times, there would be additional codes added to your pages by various plugins and widget scripts. Use the tool to find out how much time it takes to load your page and is it under acceptable level or not.
4. Check your theme on various browsers
   Whenever I talk about cross browser compatibility issues, there’d be someone who says that we’ve done it all. And I ask them how far they’ve done it only to know that they’ve tested the theme on Firefox, IE. Opera and may be Safari. That’s the end. Well, that’s not what we are talking about here. your blog is viewed by numerous type of people on the internet and you got to check if they are all able to see the website/blog the same way or not. For this you have to check the blog/site on various browsers/ resolutions and with and without elements such as Javascript, flash etc. Also there is an array of web browsers available and things doesn’t end with FF and Opera.
   Fortunately there is a nice tool available that will help you check our blog on various browsers and give you screenshots of it. So you can see yourself if there are any problems with it. Here is the tool.
5. See if you have any broken links on your site
   Go to Google webmaster Tools and find out if there are any broken links from your site. They don’t do any harm but it’s always good to keep them away. Either use a spider crawler to emulate the crawling and find out the broken links, otherwise use Google webmasters to find it. The less broken links the better.
6. Optimize your images
   No I’m talking about ALT tags LOL. Check as to how many images load on your homepage ans see how much time they take. You can use the same tool I mentioned in the first point. If they take too long to load, optimize them by converting to gifs or smaller Jpeg versions.

Okay, let’s continue with this tomorrow, meanwhile, do your initial checks first.

This week, we’ll be focussing on onsite optimization strategies and quick fixes that will give you a shot up the ladder. Less time, quick work and immediate results are what we are talking about.

Today, let’s discuss twelve super quick fixes for your blog that will help you get that extra boost on the search engines. If yours is a well indexed blog, I’m assuming that the results should show up in a week or less on the SERPs. Ok, so here goes.

1. Add an H1 tag to your headings and titles.
   Check your blog theme. Select your article title, and view “selection source” (use FireFox for this) and check if the title is put within an H1 tag. If it isn’t you will have to tweak your template and stylesheet to get this done. Make sure that every title is within an H1 tag.
2. Use of <strong> tags.
   You already know that strong tags are best weapons to highlight keywords to search engines. But have you been using it properly? Again select your article text, and view the source code. See if there are strong tags used at all. Strong tags should appear whenever you bold any part of the text. And the reason why you do it not only because you want to highlight a part of the text visually but tell to the search engines that those are your keywords.
   I wouldn’t really recommend you to use strong tags for each end every keyword you use in the article. Use it wisely and carefully. If you have been using them too frequently, slow it down.
   And, if you have been using bold tags instead of strong tags, convert all of those bold tags to strong tags, by tweaking your CSS.
   I would suggest you to use strong tags for phrases like “windows application download here” or “mac v\s windows article read”.
3. Don’t annoy readers with strong tag
   Now that you are using optimum number of strong tags, make sure that they don’t hinder with the readability of your blog. It looks awkward when every keyword appearance in your article looks in bold and readers would not get any clue on why the text is bold. Use your CSS wisely and make sure that all the strong tags inside the articles does not jut out as bold text, rather it should only look so in the source code.
4. Use “rel” tags for your links
   Rel tags are relatively not popular and this is the reason why I would insist on them. Rel tags are not used for normal external links but tag related items. So it means that using more tag elements would help, so use it wisely.
5. Use “title” for hyper links, internal and external
   The title tag too is not used wisely by bloggers because when you insert a link, people don’t really care to fill in all those details, instead only paste the URL. I’d suggest that you use “title” tags for all links internal and external as it gives quite a lot of information for the search engines about what the link is about. Be descriptive using the title tag with as less as 3-4 words, that might be the best practice, but feel free to tinker around ad find your best formula.
6. Use of “Nofollow
   No follow tags are not just for advertisements. You can use them wisely to design your page rank. Check all your external links (use a spider simulator or google webmasters) and filter out all those links (or the necessary) with nofollow so that you retain your page rank. Don’t use nofollow on all the external links, that will make google to flag your blog. Instead, may be check all those low PR pages on your site and analyze if there are lot of external links from them. If they are huge in number, reduce the juice flow by limiting with “nofollow” tags.
7. Rewrite your categories
   Categories and tags are great sources of content for search engine. So make sure you use sensible and worthwhile category phrases. A category like “Chocolate biscuits” makes more sense than “Biscuits”, so rewrite them and make them more descriptive so that search engines can elicit more information from them.
8. Avoid duplicate content or minimize it.
   We’ve made numerous reference to this situation. Use all those strategies like cutting short the article length in homepage, using nofollow etc to curb duplicate content issues.
9. Footer text tweaks
   Rewrite or rearrange your footer text if you have one with worthwhile information. If you have a copyrighted theme, you may have to keep the copyright information, but also make sure that you add information that gives you that extra mileage. More information on footer text here.
10. Page size
    Check your homepage file size now with this tool. If it’s on the higher side and takes time to load, you got to cut it short and use light weight code. Sometimes, when the theme is not CSS, XHTML valid this happens and particularly when you are using a fancy theme, it is common. I’d suggest that you cut it down and use good healthy CSS to trim down all those frills and tweak the code to a normal size so that, the page loads quick and makes crawlers indexing quick and easy, not to mention the readers pleasure.

Someone who doesn’t want his name published asked me this question -

What are different ways to earn with different type of advertisements for an average blogger, and would like to know what are other sources of income for an average blogger other than advertisements.

Average blogger here means who does not have large amount of traffic coming on his site and also who is not popular.

This sounds very interesting to me. I was wondering why he wouldn’t google down the information. Because there are already thousands of blogs on “making money online”. Well, I did the same and found that all the information on the web is not really helping the “average blogger” as he puts it. An average blogger is someone who doesn’t have loads of traffic and doesn’t enjoy a “guru status”.

So every money making guru us speaking of monetizing using affilate ads, adsense and image ads, but how effective is it on a blog with less than 100 uniques a day? The guys who advice this is probably enjoying a thousand uniques a day and it makes all sense for them to put up a chitika minimall ads or an ebay affiliate ad, but not for an average blogger.

So let’s get down to the facts.

First off, a little clarification on the “money making theory” and the “buy a Ferrari with your website” dreams.

There are two models of monetization models available as I see it. (let me known if you have more.)

Plan A.

Create a website that’s targeted to the search engine traffic.

Plan B.

Create a brand, that will get you popular with the knowledge you share.

Plan C.

Create a combo of both. Brand and search engine traffic.

Plan A - works well and helps you make loads of money if you get the basics right.
It works like this -

Phase 1 (Reaping Traffic)
Do extensive keyword research => Find out the best high paying keywords and the top searched ones related to your niche => Write great articles on them => SE optimize your site that it get’s on top of SERPs for the targeted keyword => Get the traffic

Phase 2 (Content hook)
Once the heavy traffic is around, you got to make sure that it converts in to clicks (money) and page views (retention).
For this a hook is required on the content. Make sure you write more reviews. Make sure that you give less links on the content, so that people get attracted to the ad links. Also, give directive information, not an extensive one like the wikipedia, but one where the information is available, but it will leave the reader looking for more of it.

The idea is that the search engine traffic are predominantly “information seekers”. And they are on the lookout for finding the thing they want from all around the web. And they are the perfect target for you.
- They are likely to click on links.
- They like product/service reviews.
- They like shorter articles.
- All the AdSense gimmicks like above the fold, blending ads etc works on them provided they aren’t ad-blind.

Shortfalls
The problem with this model is that they may not give you “value traffic”, there will be higher bounce rates and less subscriptions. You can curb that by providing “out of the normal” delightful content, and standing out from the rest, like Labnol. But sometimes it’s also possible that if you don’t SE optimize the site, you end up having a website that’s not attractive to the search engines as well as genuine readers.

Plan B
This is a much more relaxed environment where the focus is not on money but content and knowledge sharing. The author or the admin focuses more on delivering quality content and this itself becomes the marketing pitch for the blog. You may not get loads of traffic from the search engines because you are not writing about the gadget that was released yesterday, but you are writing about something you are comfortable with and you have expertise on.

Here, you may not get great CTR on the ads, but the following will be loyal and if you are selling a service or product, it’s easier to sell your services.

Now, having discussed about the two models - Let’s see how a low traffic blog can monetize it.
Honestly speaking, traffic is good. If you can manage traffic somehow, it makes sense for the advertiser to advertise on the blog. But this is not always possible, and you have to go through a phase where you are building traffic, and is not really up there, but still you need some sort of advertising.

1. Subscriptions
Traffic and subscriptions are related but subscriptions are more valuable and appealing than traffic to advertisers. Subscriptions means that there are people following you and they value your ideas. So if they recommend a product/service those many people following you would be trying out the product. So getting a good number of subscribers is a good idea to woo in advertisers.

2. AdSense Ads
AdSense is the friend of everyone. Since they don’t take into consideration your traffic details for approval, anyone can use them. Now the problem is that, if you don’t know how to utilize it, you better not use it. So if you don’t have heavy traffic, you might want to focus on high pay out ads that give more money on lesser clicks and lesser impressions. You will have to find out ads related to those niches, and blog about them. This is totally your call because it might piss off your already existing reader base, so you may want to do it elsewhere, it’s up to you. But they key is to get more money from less traffic.

3. Image Ads
If you are an expert on your niche, then chances are that even if you don’t have heavy traffic, there might be advertisers interested to advertise their product/services on your blog. This is just because whatever little traffic you have, it is loyal, which is attractive to the advertiser. Small ads with the 125×125 pixel do well these days, and they are much sought after too.

4. Product and Service Reviews
If you have a good following and some authority on the topic you are blogging about, there is the option of paid reviews where you can review products and services. It is not good to offer links for paid reviews as Google does not entertain it. But if you can “nofollow” the links and do honest reviews, both your readers and your advertisers will be happy about it and you can make some good money. The basic idea is that you should have some authority in the field, whatever it is.

5. Offer a service
Many people want quick money with no or less efforts and for the same reason this is an often neglected method. But I very much recommend it. Find out what you can do for others like for instance if you are good at writing, write blog posts, if you are good at social networking , try to build a good network that you can sell off. The idea is to find your USP and sell it online through your blog. There are professional guest bloggers, professional Digg specialists and Stumble Upon traffic generators available and they are paid well for doing what they are good at. Think about it.

So essentially, these are the main branches of methods to make money online, there are lot more available but all that makes sense only if you have a decent amount of traffic. Though I believe that there is scope for making money with less traffic, it is suggested that your efforts be to make your blog unique with rich content and unique followers, because if a blog stays without traffic for a long time, I don’t think anyone would be interested in it.

Sometimes it’s difficult to find things on Google. Like for instance if you want to search for all the items and the websites related to “your keyword” today or yesterday on a time bound scale, things are going to be difficult.

There is a nice tool which let’s you do it. It works just like a Google search but, you have the option of opting for data to be shows that’s indexed on Google either today or yesterday, last 7 or 30 days. This is a nifty tool especially, when you are keyword researching.

• You can find out how frequent is people blogging on the keyword.
• Do a competition analysis on the keyword.
• Do a study and decide on how and what to write on the article, looking at what’s been written already.

Like for instance, you found an interesting keyword on Google Trends that is related to your niche. And you wanna immediately blog on it to get some traffic. So it makes sense to check out what’s indexed on Google today and yesterday on that keyword. So you don’t want to repeat yourself what some one else has written, which is likely to put you lower on the SERPs. Taking a look at what’s written yesterday and today on Google (indexed), you can easily figure out how to to title the article.

Ex: The current top most searched keyword on Google is “David Copperfield” and you decide to write an article on it.
You do a time bound search and find that many people have already written (today/test) on “David Copperfield Video”.
So you might not want to repeat it, rather write on “David Copperfiled latest Video Released” or something attractive like it (be honest with it please).

Enough said, try the tool here.

Whenever someone’s copied your content,  out of ten people who have talked to me on this, nine panic !
After all, someone’s copied your content and is not a good thing. Plagiarism and scraping have been there on the web since blogging, but largely popular these days. Earlier, only high traffic, money making blogs were scraped but these days even smaller unpopular blogs are copied.

The Wikipedia says-

Web Scraping (sometimes called harvesting) generically describes any of various means to extract content from a website over HTTP for the purpose of transforming that content into another format suitable for use in another context.

So is scraping bad? How does it affect you and How can you block scrapers?

First off, I’d suggest that you relax in such situations. There’s nothing to panic as such, when someone is scraping your website/content.

The reason - If someone is stealing your content, that means that guy is clearly a struggler and has a fairly new site, with no authority whatsoever. And in most cases, the site will not have any original content at all, with lot of outgoing links, and the content on the site will be far too similar (remember those templates they use where only your name is changed?) and there’s duplicate content all over the place.

So in effect, he is not going to affect you in any ways, either in stealing your traffic on Google SERPs or in any other way.
All he is doing is copying content from different sites like your’s with a pre made template, in the futile hope that aggregating all the content will automatically throw him up on the SERPs. Which clearly does not happen.

Now, the case is different when an authority site or a relatively older/popular site scrapes content. While I have all the guts to believe that an authority site will not do such practices, accidents can happen.

An example here - Yahoo India had offered it’s content development outsourced to a private firm in Bangalore. These smart chaps went around the Internet copying all the content related to the Yahoo requests and provided them in plenty. What they did is actually rephrasing of the already existing content, and re-packaging it for Yahoo. But there were content like Indian cooking recipes, which had very little content to “rephrase”. So they ended up providing the same thing to Yahoo.

Now, the original site who wrote the content came to know about this, and files a complaint. Long story short - Yahoo lost the case and sacked the outsourcing partner.

The problem here was that, the outsourcing partner copied content from a relatively lesser known site (but with original content) and provided it to yahoo. Now Yahoo being an authority site, ranked better than the original site for all the same content. And this infact troubled the relatively lesser known site.

So in such cases where the “copy cat” has more authority, you have a reason to panic but not otherwise. Mostly in the cases of XML Scrapers, there’s no need to panic.

How can you block scrapers copying your site’s content?

There are more than one way to do it.

• Always link to one of your previous articles on the blog
  A simple text link in your article that links to one or more of your previous articles will make sure that while the scrapers are copying your content, the link still remains and you can trace them from the backlink. And it sometimes help you with another incoming link, it helps when counting number of backlinks on Yahoo, if not Google and some folks even think this is a good thing.
  So include a text link to your blog articles and you have a solution.
• Use partial feeds
  A main source of scraping is XML feeds. As all the blogs these days have a full feed published, it’s easy for scrapers to just leech out the content from teh full feed. It is a clever option to offer only partial feeds, but this could also result in unhappy genuine subscribers. So it is your take to decide whether you want to do it the harsh way or not.
• Use a copyrighter plugin
  If you are on Wordpress there ar plugins available that will help you to include a copyright notice on your XML feeds.
  You can get a nice plugin here
• Use a linkback and signature credit text
  A wiser option is to use a signature text on all your feesd, that may contain a linkback to the original blog and your signature. This will appear on all the scrpaers site too, thereby ensuring credit to your blog.
  Ex:- The one Lorelle has on her articles

If you are looking at content theft and how to fight it legally, Amit has a good article on it.

There are more technical ways to curb the scraping issue, but I leave that to the discussion as I’m unsure of them. Essentially, the fact is that while scraping or copying content can be annoying, there isn’t much you have to worry about becauase these copycats are going to weed out soon.
So ignore them, they keep mushrooming here and there, and is not worth the attention, and like someone said, use them may be for getting some backlinks, I can’t agree that they are of any good use, but yes if you are fond of numbers, may be it will help.

This is no exaggeration. A true story I’d like to share with you, probably you’ll have something to take back home.

I had launched a new website this April 12, related to the IPL chennai super kings. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a cricket team in the Indian Premier League and I support them. I had started this website just because I had to support them and the official website was scrap. I had no intentions of monetizing it, as a matter of fact I wanted to have a better site for the fans, that’s about it. But things have gone totally out of hand now (for the good that is.). Let me tell you in detail.

This is how the whole thing began.

- April 12
Started the blog, put up a good theme from WP Designer, and put a few content as well.
- The next few days, I kept adding more content and used the social media to promote it. Well, that’s submitting content to all those guys out there.
- Placed a banner ad on DailySEOblog.(Check out the right hand panel)
Traffic - Nil

- April 13-15
- Site indexed on Google, picked up a few positions on the SERPs for terms such as “chennai super kings pics” and “chennai super kings wallpaper”.
Traffic - Around 50-100 uniques a day

- April 15-18
Added more unique content, wallpapers, pics, siggies (You know the boys stuff! )
Traffic - Around 50-200 uniques a day

- April 18 - 22
Nothing at all as I was attending the Bangalore Barcamp, and took a days leave further
When I left on 18th to bangalore the traffic was around 300-400 uniques a day. And when I came back, the traffic was around 500 uniques a day.
That got me exciting, as I saw the traffic trickling down, decided to do some “home work” on it.
Though on a tight schedule, decided to spend some time on it, since I saw that on Google Trends, the search frequency for IPL related terms were increasing.

Okay, so I went about doing a quick SEO campaign for the site, the next few days.

1. Went about using all the powers on my social media network and promoted some unique content that was there on the site.
2. Targeted some regional networks, like the star brand amassadors fan sites and networks, and gave them some exclusive viral content to feed on.
3. Link building, link building. No, not the typical directory submission for page rank, but the “new kind” that helps the content travel places and keeps the bots busy on the site. This worked and articles were now getting indexed within 30 minutes.
4. Used Google Trends to fish out the IPL related keywords
5. Wrote excellent SE optimized content targeting the keywords and their combinations.
6. Traffic just multiplied by 100 times (see the stats) in just two days.

Looks very simple eh? It is indeed. Simple strategies but doing the right thing at the right time really matters.
If you look at what I achieved in numbers, check the stats.

Current Stats

VISITS

Total 17,236
Average Per Day 2,097 (It was in 200-300 range 5 days earlier)
Average Visit Length 1:29
Last Hour 175
Today 1,159
This Week 14,677

PAGE VIEWS

Total 34,471
Average Per Day 3,863
Average Per Visit 1.8
Last Hour 345
Today 2,192
This Week 27,044

Traffic Stats over the last 7 days

I think for the little effort from my side, the results are very interesting.

Some crucial things that made me achieve the results are -

i) Putting up a banner ad on DailySEOblog. (If you want one, do let me know)
ii) Promoting the site genuinely on the social media (Mind you, this isn’t just about digging and thumbs ups)
iii) Some careful and timely Keyword research
iv) Some clever onsite SE optimization
v) Getting control over the bots as to when and how should they crawl

Now, that the traffic is there, I’ve put up AdSense ( bad choice huh?) and some banner ads, if at all they make some money, why not try them?